Quality Ingredients Corporation Core Operating Principles and Values

What defines QIC as a company? What makes up our heart and soul?

QIC is a company that believes running a business is about PEOPLE, PROCESS, and RESULTS – in that order. Every day, that belief grounds us and is the underpinning of our success. It is a belief that is shared across our entire workforce of employee owners.

We use a pyramid to illustrate our PEOPLE/PROCESS/RESULTS model because it demonstrates our philosophy and priorities. We believe a business is about PEOPLE first, and therefore it serves as the base of the pyramid. We believe that if the base of the pyramid is sound, it sets up the other components of the business – PROCESS AND RESULTS – for success. If the base is not sound, the other components won’t be achieved.

PEOPLE

A business, any business, is first and foremost about people. People will drive the success or failure of the business. The PEOPLE component is at its strongest when the workforce understands and is aligned around the business’ goals and when each person understands and is driven by their role in making those goals happen. It is also strongest when the workforce shares common values on how it will work together to achieve those goals. QIC is fortunate to have a workforce of employee owners aligned around common objectives and common values. Some of the core values we hold dear include:

We focus on our external stakeholders; our business is not about us as individuals

We reject bureaucracy, layers, and things that don’t add value or slow us down – we have too much to get done, usually in a short amount of time, to spend resources on non value added things.

We are transparent and accountable. What you see is what you get; everything we do we are comfortable with it appearing in the front page of the newspaper. When we make mistakes, we will be the first to acknowledge that and we will make it right.

We are conservative and fact-based. We take a disciplined approach to decision-making and risk management. We set high standards around things that matter in health and safety.

We believe in planning our work and working our plan. Measure twice and cut once.

We believe that details matter and we must be attentive to the details. Little things can build to big differences.

We value early communication. We seek to avoid surprises and drive predictability. We seek to do what we said we were going to do, or raise any new issues as soon as they become apparent.

We are a learning organization. There are many things we don’t know. We will make mistakes. We believe in root cause analysis to get to the bottom of things and enable us to emerge stronger.

We personally believe in what we are doing and the unique value that we bring to our customers.

PROCESS

We believe that every business, no matter how large or small, needs sound processes. Processes support policies. Processes need to define how work is done and documented and employees’ roles and responsibilities in making that happen. QIC develops and continuously improves its processes around employee safety, food safety and quality, customer service, operations, and financial methods. We maintain a disciplined approach to our policies and processes to ensure the integrity of our policies and the predictability of our work. We also prioritize our processes. We think of our employee safety, food safety, and food quality processes as the “BASICS” our all of our processes. And we believe in “getting the BASICS right”, and that we have to get the basics right, before we turn our attention to other processes. In other words, it doesn’t matter how fast the equipment is running if we are not running it in a way that we know is safe for employees, producing safe to eat powders, and meets the expectations of our customers.

RESULTS

QIC is a results driven business. We establish metrics that define our success and we consider both nonfinancial and financial metrics important. We establish goals around those metrics. We track our performance against those metrics. We strive to understand our results and dig into root causes of successes and failures for the learning and improvement opportunities they provide. We tie every employee’s earnings to those metrics. We are fully transparent with our employees around our results and the implications of those results.